As a child, I couldn't wait to be an adult. I would spend hours daydreaming about the future, my exciting life, and what I would do with all that autonomy, such as owning exotic pets, painting my walls bright pink, and staying up all night. Now that I am in my mid-30s, adulthood has somewhat lost its lustre. Nothing is wrong, exactly—I have even achieved some of my dreams, with a bright pink bathroom and two weird cats—but there is still a sense of going through the motions, and my days being dully predictable: gym, work, cook, clean, collapse on the sofa.
Often I struggle to say exactly what I have done in the preceding hours, beyond "computer." Attempts to shake up my routine feel laboured and quickly fizzle out. These days I daydream about one day getting a dishwasher. I know it is not depression, having been there before. Instead, it feels more like life is lacking in juice, if not joy, and that open outlook and optimistic, playful energy that came so naturally in childhood. But is the loss of that spark inevitable—a part of growing up, a product of these turbulent times—or is it possible to get it back?
Learning from Children
"That is what my kids did for me," says Austin Kleon, 42, author of Steal Like an Artist and other illustrated guides to creativity. Starting with his popular blog in the mid-2000s, Kleon has turned his do-it-yourself creative experiments into a career, demystifying art and making it accessible to all. His first hit project was fashioning poetry from marked-up newspaper articles and posting them to Tumblr. Later he gave a talk about creativity to college students that went viral, leading to the hugely successful Steal Like an Artist.
Now Kleon's five books have been translated into over 30 languages and sold more than 2 million copies in English alone. He shares inspiration, advice, and creative prompts on his popular Substack newsletter. To meet Kleon, you might think he never ran out of energy or ideas. He speaks with me on a video call from his colourful, cluttered home studio in Austin, Texas, wearing an artist's apron and with materials within reach. But not long ago, he too had been in a slump. After more than a decade, he felt as if he had lost touch with his motivation. In part, these feelings stemmed from a "middle-aged place" and a sense of "Well, now what?"
What helped to get him out of his funk was apprenticing himself to his young children. Kleon and his wife Meghan have two sons, Owen and Jules, now 13 and 11. Even as toddlers, Kleon says being around them "was more inspiring than any art school." Their energy, fearlessness, and lightness of touch highlighted what Kleon felt was missing from his own creative practice, as well as how to get it back. "That is what kids are really good at: they show you what it is like to be a person that is completely new to the world, and completely new to making things," he says. "There is no 'Why?' There is just doing. Why? Because it is fun, because it feels good, because we like it."
Become a Beginner
Kleon's books frequently appear on the same shelf as Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and similar works that blend creativity with self-help, but his approach is not so structured, nor so self-reflective. Instead of a step-by-step course or an excavation of the soul, Kleon imagines his books as a creative "booster shot." "My idea, or dream, is that you just devour them, and then you go do something." It reflects his own informal introduction to being creative. As a child in very rural Ohio, "literally in the middle of a cornfield," Kleon did not grow up with access to art or artists but found that writing stories, playing music, and making things came naturally.
In hindsight, not knowing any better was crucial to helping Kleon on to his path. Having started his blog, he filled it with non-digital content: hand-drawn, often rough-and-ready illustrations, sketches, and mindmaps about books he had read or talks he had been to. Steal Like an Artist is likewise a hodgepodge of ideas and advice. "Looking back, it probably should not exist," Kleon says. "It feels like I really did not know what I was doing—and that is why it is so cool."
My present stagnation, Kleon suggests, may be rooted in the weight of my adult awareness and the expectation that I know what I am doing. As he writes in Don't Call It Art, that is when "things start to get boring." My routine is certainly predictable, and though there is variety in my work, the process is consistent and highly familiar. Kleon's first challenge to me is to make myself a beginner again. "Kids are in the exploring mode: their whole early life is all about learning, play, whatever," he says. As we age, we increasingly trade exploring for exploiting our present expertise and knowledge. But, he says, "The explore mode is the fun part. You have to constantly be going back to that."
Make Time for Play
Kleon prescribes for me "daily playtime," somewhere free from digital distractions and equipped with pens, paper, and craft supplies. "I want you to have toys," he says. "Go sit there for 15, 20 minutes a day, and see what happens. Eventually you will get bored enough that you will think, 'Maybe I will go ahead and make something.'" I actually already have such a space: a small desk I put in my bedroom, imagining that I would sit there to journal each morning. I have never done this, not even once. Instead, the desk is covered with laundry and the occasional cat.
Kleon inspires me to clear it, but despite having a dedicated play area and a directive to make use of it, I am struck by my reluctance to actually give it a try. Every day I find myself making excuses and putting it off. When I do eventually sit down to a blank sheet of paper and some felt tips, I make a mark—then am instantly compelled to throw it out and start again. The exercise is sobering: is even a doodle beyond me? I feel self-conscious, as if I am waiting for someone to tell me what to draw, and a bit silly. That is exactly how I should be feeling, Kleon says—the aim is to get comfortable with it. That is partly why he wears his "ridiculous" apron when in his studio: to signal to his brain that it is playtime. "Something that makes you feel really silly is best."
Make Something with Your Hands
What helps me over my block is bypassing the blank page entirely. When I next return to the desk, I take a newspaper. Inspired by Kleon's "blackout poems," I take a permanent marker to a story about darts, covering up some words, leaving others exposed, and transforming their sense. You would be hard pressed to call the result poetry, but the process is unexpectedly engrossing, even relaxing—I am reminded of those adult colouring-in books—and a welcome break from how I usually experience words: on a screen. Kleon is not surprised to hear his blackout poetry was more inviting than the blank page: the exercise grants "permission to be bad," like collaging, he says. Such low-stakes scrappiness can be helpful if you feel stuck in life or work.
Having broken the seal, I find my later attempts at playtime much more relaxed and free. I spend an hour drawing a scene I saw on a temple wall while on holiday in Egypt, taking time with the lines and switching out my pens; I make a thank you card for a friend, using pictures cut out from a newspaper. The biggest revelation is how good it feels to be making something, away from a screen. There is a lot of focus on the deleterious effects of digital devices, but I had not anticipated that a quiet, analogue activity would come as such a relief.
Find What You Really, Really Like
It is perhaps not surprising that Kleon's advice on how to jump-start your lust for life steers away from technology. It is not just the timesuck of mindless scrolling and the fragmenting effect on our attention spans: there is a fundamental sameness to the time we spend online. One way to come alive again is to attune to your individual taste and interests: to pinpoint with precision exactly what you like, follow your curiosity, and invest in your passions. That is another area where we can learn from kids, says Kleon: "No one is necessarily telling them, 'Hey, maybe you should ease up on the dinosaur stuff,' 'Maybe you should stop watching Indiana Jones every day.'"
As a child, I remember taking up obsessions freely, learning about different types of seashells, reading every book by a single author. "What is a weird thing that you could get into now?" Kleon asks. For him, recently, it was owls: he installed an owl box outside his studio, tracked its residents, and drew them in his diary. He had no outcome in mind. "I was just doing it because I was into owls." Inspired by the fun I had copying out hieroglyphics, I decide to get into ancient Egypt: an appropriately childlike special interest and a significant shake-up from my usual diet of breaking news, pop culture, and contemporary fiction. It feels like discovering a room I did not know I had. Kleon is right: when you have been zigging for so long, sometimes all you need to do is zag.
Be Your Own Parent
My main takeaways from Kleon's coaching are: 1) even tiny experiments and changes in routine can make a big difference, and 2) they are remarkably difficult to actually prioritise. I have more control over my time than most, yet I still struggled to play for even 15 minutes. This is not uncommon, Kleon says. "People feel like they cannot allot the time for something that is not going to have a return." Lack of resources—money for materials, access to appropriate space, even simply energy levels—can also be barriers to exploring our creative childlike sides. But it is important that we do not let that stop us. "Play is not a frivolous thing: you need it, this is how you keep your spirit alive, it is important."
Being a dad also taught Kleon about the importance of meeting needs—his own, as much as his kids'. "Parents will do things for their children that they will not do for themselves—they will go to the soccer field with their kids every Saturday and sit there because they know that it is good for their kids' development. With every parenting book I read, I thought, 'Well, this is just human advice.'" You do not have to go so far as to have a conversation with your inner child or "reparent" them, Kleon says. But it can be helpful, if life is feeling heavy, to figure out what you need to put in place in order to be able to let go and have some fun. "No matter how old you are, you can do that in your life." If you have children yourself, they can show you the way, Kleon says. "Hanging out with four-year-old Owen put me in touch with four-year-old Austin and, in a weird way, they got to play with each other." But I do not have to become a parent to access the benefits, he adds. I could volunteer to be a babysitter.
